Tuesday, 2 August 2016

Misogyny and Motherhood in US Politics

Misogyny and Motherhood in U.S. Politics

Like many Canadians, I spent the last two weeks (late
July 2016) glued to my television set, watching the Republican and Democratic
National Conventions. By the end of it, I was sick to death of hearing what a good
parent Hillary Clinton was.

Hillary Clinton

I’m a Clinton fan. I am very impressed by her
45-year-long history of public service, starting with her work trying to ensure
that schools were desegregated and that children with disabilities attended
school.I am even more impressed that
she was US Secretary of State for four very difficult years.I admire tremendously her organizational and
negotiating skills. I can’t understand why as Secretary of State she didn’t
separate her professional and personal emails (something that as a professional
woman, I routinely do) but I don’t think that disqualifies her from the
Presidency.

I think Ms. Clinton has been given a raw deal in US
politics (a raw deal that the Canadian press also picks up on with its
insistence on reporting on her supposed “untrustworthiness” instead of all her
accomplishments and commitment to the public good).I think a lot of the hostility to her is
outright misogyny; how dare she be so competent, how dare she be so
self-confident, how dare she be so cool?She had to counteract that image and present herself as warm and “human”
during the Democratic convention.

So it didn’t surprise me when Michelle Obama started
her long speech by talking about how Hillary was a good parent and grandparent,
and cared so much for “our children and grandchildren”. But it did surprise me
that her entire speech was woven around that theme.There was a point where she could have
switched to Clinton’s accomplishments, her organizational skills, her views on
foreign policy, etc.

It also sickened me that Mrs. Obama had to present
herself as just a wife and mother. Michelle Obama is a brilliant lawyer, a
graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, but she’s spent the
last eight years suppressing her professional qualifications and her intellect,
focusing on children, exercise, and a healthy diet. Perhaps she learned from
Hillary Clinton’s faux pas in 1992, when Clinton mentioned in an interview that
she hadn’t spent her time before the election baking cookies, preferring to
focus on her professional career. That should not have been controversial, but
it was (perhaps deliberately) misconstrued by the misogynist press as a
denigration of housewives.

This nonsense about women politicians having to be
good wives-and-mothers does not go on in the rest of the world, as far as I am
aware. Recently Teresa May succeeded David Cameron as Conservative Prime Minister
of the United Kingdom: When her opponent Andrea Leadsom claimed that she would
be a better Prime Minister than Ms. May because she had children and Ms. May
did not, she suffered a very quick fall from grace. And as far as I know the
political fates of Angela Merkel (Germany), Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Dilma
Rousseff (Brazil), and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (Argentina) have not been
tied to their qualifications or lack thereof as mothers, whatever one might
think of them.

Angela Merkel

Michelle Bachelet

People who study genocide know that being a good
parent doesn’t necessarily make you a good politician or even a good person. By
all accounts Rudolf Hӧss, the commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp,
was a good father.He did his job—killing
Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Polish anti-Nazis—during the day and
then returned home in the evening to the bosom of his family. Lots of German
women, many of them probably excellent mothers, joined the Nazi Party (see
Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland:
Women, The Family, and Nazi Politics, St. Martin’s Press, 1987). So I’m
prepared to believe that even an ignorant, racist, narcissistic egoist like
Donald Trump might have been a good father (though despite his children’s’ testimonials,
I rather doubt it.)

I’m really glad that in my several decades as a
professor no one has ever asked me how good a mother I am. When I publish books
or receive academic awards my son does not have to show up to testify that I
am a good mother; who knows what he would say. As for chocolate chip
cookies, the ones he baked as a child were better than any I ever made. Professional women should unite to defend
Michelle and Hillary against the pressure to present themselves as “just” wives-and-mothers
when they are so much else.Here's a link to an article about how much negative press Clinton is getting, compared both to her former opponent, Bernie Sanders, and to Donald Trump. https://www.good.is/articles/hillary-clinton-negative-press

About Me

Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann is Canada Research Chair in International Human Rights, holding a joint appointment in the Department of Global Studies and the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2006 the Human Rights section of the American Political Science Association named Dr. Howard-Hassmann its first Distinguished Scholar of Human Rights.Since arriving at Laurier in 2003 she has published Compassionate Canadians: Civic Leaders Discuss Human Rights (2003), Reparations to Africa (2008) and Can Globalization Promote Human Rights? (2010), and has also co-edited Economic Rights in Canada and the United States (2006) and The Age of Apology (2008). She established and maintains a website on political apologies, which can be visited at political-apologies.wlu.ca.